Screen Readers: Toggle Off All Mathjax

[Alexa Murray]

I have read the Mathjax documentation, searched the wiki, and searched the user group.

I am wondering if Mathjax comes with any built-in options for the user to toggle off/on all Mathjax on page/site via a menu?

NVDA reads math pretty well (with MathML in HTML), and the user has the option to either not announce math or announce with beep.

When I try to listen to math on pages with Mathjax, turning off "Generate Speech" via the Mathjax context menu only partially exposes with underlying MathML to the screen reader, and it still reads out "clickable" for every math expression.

I tested this using this demo: Mathjax Demo | mml-chtml . (I also used multiple other test pages.)

What I want to achieve : user can toggle Mathjax on/off so that the webpage behaves exactly as it would with only MathML and no Mathjax.

The discussions related to this that I have seen only appeared to address visual rendering of math.

I'm working in Windows 11 with a variety of browsers (Firefox, Vivaldi, Chrome, etc.)

[Davide Cervone]

I am wondering if Mathjax comes with any built-in options for the user to toggle off/on all Mathjax on page/site via a menu?

There is no menu option to disable MathJax completely.  If it is loaded in the page, it will try to process the math (that's its purpose, after all, so the page author requested that).

The closest thing to what you are asking would probably be to use the MathJax contextual menu to first turn off "Semantic Enrichment" in the Options sub menu (this will disable both speech and Braille output, as well as the expression explorer), then enable the "Include Hidden MathML" option in the same submenu.  This will insert visually hidden MathML that is available to the screen reader.  The visual output will still be MathJax output, but the screen reader will get the hidden MathML.

What I want to achieve : user can toggle Mathjax on/off so that the webpage behaves exactly as it would with only MathML and no Mathjax.

The only way to do that would be to use something like Grease Monkey (or one of the work-a-likes) to disable MathJax on the page, or perhaps use an ad blocker to prevent the MathJax scripts from loading.  Without that, MathJax will always produce the output, at least.  So if you want "exactly" like no MathJax, you have to prevent MathJax from running at all.  MathJax doesn't have a user-level switch for that (though it can be done at the page-level configuration).

I hope that gives you what you need to accomplish your goals.

Davide